Sά͜δδγ༄

[First Squawk @FirstSquawk]

CHINA PLANS TO DROP A 15% TARIFF ON US LNG THIS WEEK, POTENTIALLY REOPENING TRADE BETWEEN THE TWO NATIONS. NEW DEALS COULD FOLLOW.

[Luke Bayes (Eight Amps) @lukebayes]

It’s this line of thinking that caused me to pull the ejection lever from an unreasonably successful career in Silicon Valley to build cabinets in my home town.

I’m back in the grind now with Eight Amps, but it has such a different character because I’m operating on different terms with different goals.

Especially if you’re still young, take this advice as early as possible.

[Sά͜δδγ༄ @Ready2Reboot]

@LDSeongdo Heaven forbid you take care of the things you are given to use free of charge and clean up after yourself. It takes less than an hour once a year.

[David Perell @david_perell]

R.F. Kuang has written seven books, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and trained at some of the world's top universities: Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale.

Her wisdom-per-word ratio is also off the charts.

Some highlights from our conversation:

1) Emotions are like colors. Mix them! Emotions are never one-dimensional. Bring together fear and courage, love and revulsion, joy and panic. This collision of feelings is closer to how emotion actually works.

2) Practice literary shapeshifting. Become a new person, a new persona, and a new type of author with every project. Do not confuse your habitual voice with your authentic voice: there is no single way of constructing sentences that must define you. Treat language as a fluid and flexible tool.

3) There's no correlation between how good writing feels in the moment and the quality of the product. We mistake effortlessness for genius, flow, or divine inspiration. So don't evaluate a day’s work by the pleasure of producing it. Judge whether the sentences escaped your pre-existing patterns and helped you think something through.

4) Good writing comes from being attentive to what's happening around you and writing with specificity about those observations, rather than relying on the theoretical. Throughout the day, ask: “Where is this feeling sitting in my body? How am I physically responding to this?” Those questions force you beyond the abstract label and toward something more specific than the reader could easily imagine for themselves.

5) Use your zero draft to discover the beating heart of the story, not to prove that you can already write it. Research, brainstorm, follow your nose, and collect whatever feels surprising or “crunchy.” At this stage, coherence is less valuable than emotional resonance.

6) Draft in layers. Let the early draft remain “balls on sticks.” Add the setting, architecture, faces, furniture, and drape colors in later passes. A person’s visual appearance is often the least interesting thing about them.

7) Use the outsider’s perspective to make language strange again. Nabokov could play, stretch, and innovate with English because he was fascinated by the oddities and opportunities of particular word combinations.

8) Be suspicious of “volunteer words for volunteer thoughts.” Volunteer words are the phrases that offer themselves immediately because they are already floating around in your head. They repeat common discourse and carry ideas that are easy to digest; you are filling the page from your pre-existing dataset rather than articulating something you have actually observed or thought through.

9) If you're stuck, put the subconscious to work. Open a blank document, type a title, word, or phrase, then save and close it. Return after the problem has had time to work on you in the background.

10) Serious writing doesn't require solemnity. Soaring observations about history or human nature can sit beside potty jokes.

11) AI can offer readily available words for readily available thoughts, but readily available thoughts do not push boundaries. It may reproduce impressive human patterns, but “you won’t get your next Pale Fire from an LLM.”

12) Thinking about the audience as you write a first draft is a death sentence. The moment you start writing while looking over your shoulder, you stop taking the story where it needs to go.

Timestamps:
0:29 Writing your emotions
6:44 Observing people
15:20 Why easy writing doesn't work
23:09 Building unique voices for each book
30:47 What Kuang learned from debate
32:52 Why primary sources matter
35:33 AI & writing
40:54 How to start a book
45:16 Trust your subconscious
50:25 Copy the writers you love
52:57 Being goofy
57:34 Find a driving question
1:01:36 What every writer needs to learn
01:04:38 Book and movie recommendations

I've shared the full conversation with R.F. Kuang below. If you'd rather watch the full thing on YouTube, or listen to it all on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

Enjoy!

[Mirren @0gMirren]

A banking professor ran the test on a real bank to settle where money comes from. Almost nobody watches him show the result.

Richard Werner, Chair in International Banking at Southampton, Zurich, February 2018.

The textbook says banks take deposits and lend them on. The accounting says something else.

Watch the section where he lays out the 3 competing theories side by side, then shows which one the ledger supports.

A lectern, a conference badge, a dark screen behind him.

Central banks published the same answer. The textbooks never changed.

[Sά͜δδγ༄ @Ready2Reboot]

@Rainmaker1973

[WITNESS813 @WITNESS813]

I love this so much !! 🤗🥳🥰

[Jordan @Jordan370462593]

One of Dolly Parton’s most cross cultural collaborations was Peace Train her 1996 recording with South African choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo
The more that I see about this remarkable woman,the more impressed I am
What a huge loss her passing is to the world,she gave so much 🥺🥺

[TradeIntel @Trade_Intel_]

#NatGas - just hit a rare historical extreme: 7 consecutive red weeks. 📉

This has only happened 4 other times in 20 years. Look at how it played out next:

• Week 8 bounced green: 3 out of 4 times

Extreme downside fatigue. Watch for a bounce.

$BOIL $KOLD

[Breaking911 @Breaking911]

A 97-year-old British woman has broken her own Guinness World Record as the oldest woman to perform a wing walk.

[Anuj @anujcodes_21]

A man spends 50 years teaching at MIT.

He knows his time is running out.

So he records one last lecture — everything he knows, distilled into a single hour.

He died 5 months later.

This is that lecture.

The most important hour you'll watch this week.

Bookmark it for later!

[Sά͜δδγ༄ @Ready2Reboot]

@DavidDe78665162 This is all you post about 😂 I'm glad things were workin out for you

[Brian Feroldi @BrianFeroldi]

Accounts Receivable Cheat Sheet

[Nina Deer @longdepzai_n]

Unbelievable Coincidences

[Sά͜δδγ༄ @Ready2Reboot]

@Levi2v2y Right? Middle of heat advisories all over the country and it's dropping.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Dyson, a company best known for its vacuums and hair dryers, has unveiled a new automated rotating farm design that aims to make food production more local, sustainable and dependable.

[Lj Priest (Trader Jill) @RealTraderJill]

Europeans in America for the first time for the World Cup is my absolute favorite content right now!

This Frenchman is hilarious!

[Sά͜δδγ༄ @Ready2Reboot]

@BenFerrari3 Reverse split

[Brad @BradleyKellard]

In 2024, Rory Sutherland explained how to weaponize human psychology to build a billion $$$ business.

36 yrs in advertising taught him:

- Psychology beats engineering
- When to explore & when to exploit
- Being famous increases your luck surface area

12 lessons from ad GOAT:

[Brad @BradleyKellard]

In 2023, Stanford professor Graham Weaver gave his last lecture on how to destroy fear & live a wildly ambitious life.

His frameworks:

- Suffering is inevitable
- Signup for "10 years" test
- "Not me" & "Not now" traps

13 lessons on how to build an asymmetric life: